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Fiction Chronicle

DEVILS IN THE SUGAR SHOP. By Timothy Schaffert. (Unbridled, paper, $14.95.) Think “Sex and the City.” Now make the city ... Omaha. The circle of women in this sprightly and eager-to-please novel — an artist, a writer, a hostess of sex-toy parties and a pair of twins who own a bookstore — are wise and worldly, enjoying the gentrification campaign that has given them their own ersatz Manhattan. Ashley, a writer of sexy novels that don’t sell very well, conducts erotica-writing workshops and fights valiantly against the genre’s clichés, “forbidding any character’s mouth from forming into ‘a perfect O’ of pleasure or surprise or delight, or into an O of anything, for that matter.” With her best friends — Viv, the artist, and Deedee, who has found great success selling, Tupperware-style, what used to be called “marital aids” — Ashley has made her little slice of redeveloped downtown Omaha into a swanky scene that meets chick lit’s exacting locational criteria. But its setting aside, can a novel still be called chick lit if (a) it’s written by a guy, and (b) most of the chicks in question are in their late 30s to early 40s and not especially interested in shoes? When the characters spend as much time as these do searching for love, sipping cocktails and seeking comfort in one another’s company, the answer is yes, though Schaffert’s version of it is a good deal smarter and funnier than most of the disposable volumes cluttering up this genre’s walk-in closet.

WHO IS LOU SCIORTINO? By Ottavio Cappellani. Translated by Howard Curtis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $13.) Reading this chaotic if sporadically funny first novel by Cappellani, a Sicilian journalist, one can easily picture the author typing beneath a framed photograph of Elmore Leonard. Between its plot (which echoes “Get Shorty”), its mannered take on hard-boiled prose and its juxtapositions of carnage and comedy, it’s practically an homage. But without Leonard’s cool self-control, Cappellani quickly lets his story get out of hand, and he’s never able to rein things back in. Lou Sciortino is the grandson of Don Lou, a New York mob kingpin with strong ties to the Sicilian operation. With an eye toward money laundering, Don Lou sets his grandson up in the movie business. But when someone plants a bomb at the office, it’s off to the old country for young Lou, who’s expected to lie low. Once there, however, he falls in with the local Mafiosi, and before long he’s running errands for Don Lou’s old rival Sal Scali. There are some funny scenes and characters here — take, for example, the penitent pimp who tries to get all his girls straight jobs, only to have them complain bitterly about the hassle of opening bank accounts and finding husbands — but the tonal shifts from farce to violence are handled clumsily, and the action feels both overpopulated and underdeveloped.

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TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY: 75 Objects With Unexpected Significance. Edited by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes. (Prince ton Architectural Press, paper, $17.50.) Short essays about treasured possessions, by artists, designers, writers and performers . The cartoonist and musician James Kochalka recalls playing with an assortment of rubber animals as a boy, acting out battles, domestic scenes, everything. But the star was always Sunshine, above: one special little yellow pig.Credit
From “Taking Things Seriously”

THE FAITH HEALER OF OLIVE AVENUE. By Manuel Muñoz. (Algonquin, paper, $12.95.) Fresno, in California’s Central Valley, is only a few hours’ drive from both San Francisco and Los Angeles. But for the characters in this moving and tender story collection it might as well be in another world entirely — one where the gay sensibility is defined mainly by yearning rather than glittering experience, and where the added difficulty of reconciling one’s homosexuality with tradition-bound Mexican-American culture can drive a person to despair. All of these stories are set within a single neighborhood on Fresno’s heavily Hispanic working-class outskirts, and their energy derives from the friction between the characters’ conflicting desires for love and acceptance, escape and permanence. In “Bring Brang Brung,” the father of a kindergarten-age boy returns to Fresno from San Francisco after the death of his lover and finds that he needs, more than he’s willing to admit, the company and comfort of his sister, who never left home. The young gay man in “The Good Brother” lives with his disabled mother and has put his own life on indefinite hold. “He accepts his position in this world much too easily, as if someday (but not now) he will return the glances he receives from the beautiful man in the red Datsun pickup on Tuesdays at the grocery store. Someday his life will begin.” Muñoz writes elegantly and sympathetically about these men, their families and their private aches. His stories are far too rich to be classified under the limiting rubrics of “gay” or “Chicano” fiction; they have a softly glowing, melancholy beauty that transcends those categories and makes them universal.

THE FOLDED WORLD. By Amity Gaige. (Other Press, $23.95.) In this tightly written and emotionally satisfying novel, a young couple’s marriage is thrown into jeopardy by the husband’s workaholic tendencies — a bad situation made worse given that he’s a social worker dealing with mentally ill clients. Charlie Shade moves to New England from the Midwest, where a golden childhood has fostered in him a sense of obligation to help those less fortunate. His wife, Alice, is well read and whip-smart, though disappointed at the prospect of handing her life over to newborn twin daughters at the very moment she was hoping to pursue the college education she had deferred. When Charlie takes on as a client Opal, a deeply disturbed woman with no friends or family, his natural empathy overtakes his judgment and he gets too close for the comfort of his boss, his wife and himself. Meanwhile, Alice finds herself drawn to one of Charlie’s former clients, Hal, a brooding bookstore clerk who keeps sending her home with Proust and Samuel Richardson, along with a fluttering heart and a nagging doubt. Gaige, the author of the well-received novel “O My Darling,” is better at describing the mysteries of a fragile marriage than the workings of a fragile mind — her attempts to write in the voices of Opal or Hal come across as overly mannered — but she’s extraordinarily adept at revealing her characters’ personalities in just a few words. If the novel’s climactic ending seems a little too cinematic (a desperate lover sprints down the road through heavy fog, dodging oncoming traffic, shouting his beloved’s name), it doesn’t make the moment any less stirring.

THOREAU’S LAUNDRY: Stories. By Ann Harleman. (Southern Methodist University, $22.50.) Love tested — by illness, by betrayal, by absence — is the subject of Ann Harleman’s second story collection. In many of these tales, the normal course of love is halted and redirected by a calamitous event: the onset and cruel progress of a spouse’s debilitating disease, the discovery of adultery, the initiation of a child-custody battle. In that last story, “Street of Swans,” one of the collection’s strongest, an American translator living on a temporary visa in the glasnost-era Soviet Union is loath to return to the United States, for fear of losing her young daughter to her ex-husband. Meanwhile, a Russian man of her acquaintance has fallen in love with her. “Was it then the idea first came to me?” she wonders. “Russian women married in order to leave; I needed to stay.” Harleman is capable of startling a reader with a perfect descriptive touch, as when one character sees her ex-husband on television and turns off the set, making him vanish “with a snap, like a wishbone breaking,” or when she notes that an orchestra tuning up before a performance makes “quick interrogative sounds.” But there’s even more pleasure to be had in watching these characters stubbornly continue their march toward love, even as they must dodge the slings and arrows that fortune hurls their way.

Jeff Turrentine is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Slate and The Washington Post.